Angry in the Great White North

I write a 3000 page report, distilling data from hundreds of sources.  Will there be mistakes?  Almost certainly, especially if I do it myself.  If I have hundreds of reviewers, I might expect far fewer mistakes.

The fourth Assessment Report (AR4) from the IPCC is rife with errors, it seems. 

First there was the prediction that Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. 

Complete nonsense.

The Amazon forests shrunk by 40% because of global warming?

Nope, that's because of logging.

There have been others, listed in detail by Lawrence Solomon.

I want to highlight two of the most recent ones.   Holland, apparently, if 50% below sea level.  Not even close:

A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.

In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.

Climate-sceptic MPs were quick to react. Conservative MP Helma Nepperus and Richard de Mos from the right-wing Freedom Party want the minister to explain to parliament how these figures were used to decide on national climate policy. "This may invalidate all claims that the last decades were the hottest ever," Mr De Mos said.

The incorrect figures which date back to 2007 were revealed on Wednesday by the weekly Vrij Nederland. The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency told reporters that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) added together two figures supplied by the agency: the area of the Netherlands which is below sea-level and the area which is susceptible to flooding. In fact, these areas overlap, so the figures should not have been combined to produce the 55 percent quoted by the IPCC.

And then there is north Africa losing its ability to grow its own food:

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC's climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC's retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed 'Glaciergate' by commentators.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.

This report is the IPCC's most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself.

The Synthesis Report issue is particularly bad, because Pachauri can't say he had nothing to do with it, and also because Pachauri insisted that this document was rock solid.

There have been others, but what strikes me is that as we gather evidence of more errors, they all tilt in the same way.

That doesn't make sense.  Go back to the version of the report I wrote.  In that imaginary report, I blundered multiple times.  And remember, too, that my report, like AR4, contains no original research.  I just quote other people's work.

I would expect that in any random survey of mistakes, I would see errors that supported the theory of global warming, and mistakes that suggested global warming wasn't happening.

In other words, I would just as likely have quoted a badly-written non-peer reviewed report that showed African food production being boosted by global warming.

If I was making random mistakes.the sort that I ought to be forgiven for making.

But in AR4, the mistakes all tilt the argument towards global warming being real. 

That's very odd.

It suggests that there is no randomness to this at all.  There is a blindness at all levels of the IPCC that prevents these so-called scientists from seeing mistakes if the mistake supports global warming.

I have a suspicion that in the original drafts of AR4 (or maybe we have to go back to AR1 and AR2 to see this), the mistakes were more random, and the review process filtered both sorts of errors out.

But now the review process lets slip really awful and obvious blunders through, as long as the awful and obvious blunder suggests global warming is real, and especially if it suggests that global warming is really bad.

The IPCC is broken, at all levels.  It can't be trusted to provide legitimate data and analysis.  It has slipped irrevocably into advocacy.

Time to scrap it and start over.

And maybe we should take some time to get it right this time around.  Trust me when I say we have the time.   Nothing bad is going to happen climate-wise.